New Hedge-Fund Manager Collecting Trend: Rights To Pictures Of Themselves

Chase Coleman must really like how he looked during his collegiate days, because he’s made sure that’s one of basically two pictures of him that exist for public consumption. While Dan Loeb and Steve Cohen spend their ample disposable income on art, Chase and a few other far-sighted peers prefer to spend theirs on mugs of themselves.

Many money-managing magnates treat cameras like kryptonite. If they do get captured, they pay to take the photos out of circulation….

Buying out a shoot is expensive. One photographer says he was paid $20,000 to turn over all of his pictures of a hedge-fund titan. He asked not to be named -- or name his subject -- out of concern he’d never get a job shooting a master of the universe again.

Also, if John Meriwether’s photo-rights-acquisition strategy is any indication, he may have expected the worst at Long-Term Capital Management a couple of years before its spectacular demise.

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In 1994, Trent shot John Meriwether and his partners for Businessweek just months after they opened Long-Term Capital Management. A few days after the shoot, a Meriwether minion called and asked him to sign an agreement not to resell any of the images. Trent proposed an “astronomical sum.” He heard nothing further and figured he had scared them off.

Two years later, he got a call back. Long-Term Capital said it would pay his crazy amount and -- better yet -- send the money by overnight mail. Trent had done almost no business with the Meriwether photos, and he had just purchased a house that needed renovating, so he agreed.